Drobo SAN Storage for Business B800i
Drobo delivers "big storage in a small box" to create the best storage experience ever for small and medium sized businesses and departments at larger enterprises. Built on proven BeyondRAID technology, Drobo redefines IT economics by delivering award-winning iSCSI SAN storage and advanced capabilities usually reserved for more expensive enterprise solutions.
Drobo iSCSI SAN storage is designed to provide reliable and high performance storage to servers running business-critical applications like data protection, email, and server virtualization. It connects seamlessly to your existing TCP/IP network and utilizes the industry-standard iSCSI protocol to provide simple, consolidated storage for your servers.
With two iSCSI models available, there's a Drobo that's right for your application. The 8-bay cost-effective B800i model is ideal for data protection or for small business building a SAN for the first time. The powerful 12-bay B1200i model adds Data-Aware Tiering and redundant, hot-swappable components to ensure maximum performance and high-availability of business applications.
BeyondRAID Technology
An iSCSI Drobo can hold up to 24 TB of raw storage and beyond. To add capacity, simply insert a new hard drive or replace your smallest drive with a larger one, even when all drive bays are full. Unlike traditional RAID systems, the BeyondRAID technology in Drobo enables you to leverage different drive capacities, allowing for continuous expansion as larger drives become available. With Drobo, expansion is automatic, instantaneous, and access to data is always maintained.
Drobo can protect from single or dual drive failures and has a virtual hot spare capability - ensuring all drives are used at all times.
Optimizing Business Applications
Like with business applications, Drobo is ideal for building your first server virtualization cluster and had been certified for VMware vSphere and Citrix Xen Server environments. Drobo is also a cost-effective way to provide reliable storage for your backup server and has been certified for use with Symantec Backup Exec. Learn more about Drobo business solutions on the Drobo Broadcast Network.
About iSCSI SANs
iSCSI can be used to connect storage directly to servers using a high-speed connection, or it can be used to create a Storage Area Network (SAN) with to 2, 5, or 10 plus servers.
Design
All Drobos have carrier-less drive insertion. This means there are no special parts or screws that have to be added to the drives before they are inserted. It's like inserting a cassette tape into a video recorder.
The modular design of the B1200i model delivers enhanced availability and serviceability for environments hosting business-critical applications. This allows fans and power supplies to be replaced without taking the Drobo down.
While both Drobo SAN storage models can be rack mounted, the Drobo model B800i is compact and quiet, making it ideal for workgroup environments that need storage located in an office or on a desk.
Even the faceplate is magnetic, with the manual on the back. Primary management is by using drive status lights and visual capacity gauge.
And, all Drobos look good too!
BeyondRAID
Most modern storage arrays aggregate disks and prevent against single drive failures using a 20-year-old technology called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks). While RAID has served many businesses well, it requires up-front knowledge of its functionality and has many shortcomings. BeyondRAID technology, built into every Drobo, addresses these shortcomings and makes virtualizing disk drives usable by everyone. BeyondRAID provides these enhancements over traditional RAID:
- Thin Provisioning as a fundamental capability allows for infinite capacity expansion by just replacing a drive with a larger one
- Instant Expansion occurs when a new, or larger, drive is inserted without any disruption in service
- Drobo's volumes are Smart Volumes, pulling needed storage from a common pool and then returning deleted blocks back to the common pool
- Mixed Drive Utilization allows you to insert any drive, of any size, or any type, and Drobo will optimally use it - check out our interactive Capacity Calculator
- Automatic Protection Levels ensures the best algorithm is used to protect from drive failure depending on the number of drives that are inserted without any user configuration
- Dual Disk Redundancy enhances BeyondRAID protection by guarding from multiple drive failures
- Virtual Hot Spare utilizes all drives at all time - no drives sitting idle waiting for one to fail
Drobos are Data Aware, intelligently handling data for added resiliency, performance, and management
- Drive Re-ordering allows Drobo disk packs to be moved to another Drobo, and even re-ordered, while still functioning - try that with RAID
Data-Aware Tiering
Data-Aware Tiering SANs allow businesses to consolidate storage resources and share that storage across all connected servers and their applications. The reality is that different applications have different workloads. Transactional databases require different storage behavior than streaming media applications. Traditional storage has treated all workloads as equal, not optimizing for any of them.
The intellegence built into the Drobo model B1200i allows it to do Data-Aware Tiering, optimizing data layout and drive useage for "hot" requests. Providing faster access to frequently requested information will improve performance of Exchange, SQLServer, and other transactional applications that read and write lots of small data chunks.
Drobo Dashboard Management
Drobo Dashboard is the single tool to centrally manage all of your Drobos. Drobo Dashboard gives you status as if all of your Drobos were right in front of you by providing you the same status lights and capacity guage that are on the front panel. All adminitration tasks are a single click away and there's even a built-in data protection tool called Drobo Copy to easily copy data to and from your Drobo. Simply, it's the easiest way to configure and manage business-class storage.
Capacity
- 8 drive bays
- 3.5" SATA 1 / SATA II drives
- Expandable by hot-swapping drives with larger ones. Use our capacity calculator to estimate available storage in various configurations.
- Go to Capacity Calculator.
BeyondRAID Features
- Thin Provisioning
- Instant Expansion
- Mixed Drive Size Utilization
- Automatic Protection Levels
- Dual Disk Redundancy
- Virtual Hot Spare
- Data Aware
- Drive Re-ordering
Additional Features
- Smart Volumes (LUNs, up to 255)
- Drive Spin Down
- Drobo Copy
- Ethernet Features
- Connection failover
- Jumbo Frames (up to 9000 Kb MTU
Nework Protocols
Operating System Support
- Windows 7 Windows Vista (Service Pack 1)
- Windows XP (Service Pack 3)
- Windows 2008 Server
- Windows 2003 Server
- Mac OS X 10.5.6 or greater (Intel Only)
- Mac OS X Server 10.5.6 or greater (Intel Only)
- Linux (support is currently in Beta)
- VMware vSphere 4.x
- XenServer 5.6
File System Options
- Windows: NTFS
- Mac OS X: HFS+
- Linux: EXT3
- VMware: VMFS
Certified Applications
- VMware vSphere 4.x
- Citrix XenServer 5.6
- Symantec Backup Exec 2010
Management
- Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights
- Drobo Dashboard version 2.0 or later
Size and Weight
- Width: 12.17 in (309.1 mm)
- Height: 5.46 in (138.7 mm) - 3 rack units
- Depth: 14.10 in (358.1 mm)
- Weight: 16 lbs 3 oz (7.34 kg)
Power and Cooling
- Single, fixed power supply
- Dual, fixed cooling fans
- Idle system (standby, drives off): 13 watts
- Typical idle system (idle, drive spin down mode, eight drives): 25 watts
- Typical busy system (eight drives): 82 watts
Acoustics
- Normal operation: 30.4 dB
- Certifications
- Environmental: RoHS; WEEE; REACH
- Regulatory: FCC Part 15 Class B; Canada ICES-003 Class B; CE Mark; CISPR22:19973rd Edition Class B; MIC Mark; VCCI Approval
- to V.3; BSMI Approval to CNS13438; ACA Approval to AS/NZS 3548
- Safety: UL;cUL; TUV; CB
Warranty
- One or two years, depending on the product and country of purchase.
